LONDON — Prime Minister David Cameron offered Friday to send sniffer dogs and fencing to help control the surge in migrants trying to cross into Britain, pledging to work closely with French authorities to get a grip on the crisis.

Cameron chaired an emergency security meeting just after returning from a trip to Asia, and said he would speak later in the day with French President Francois Hollande, as part of efforts to work “hand in glove” with France. Land belonging to the Ministry of Defense may be used to ease congestion near the Channel Tunnel.

“We rule nothing out in taking action to deal with this very serious problem,” he said. “We are absolutely on it.”

Rob Stothard/Getty ImagesA general view of a make shift camp near the port of Calais on July 31, 2015 in Calais, France. Strike action and daily attempts by hundreds of migrants to enter the Channel Tunnel and onto trains heading to the United Kingdom is causing delays to passenger and freight services across the channel.

Thousands of migrants have been scaling fences near the tunnel, hopping on freight trains or trucks destined for Britain. The chaos has disrupted small businesses and roads on the British side of the border – and trucking associations are outraged.

The European Union’s spring public opinion poll, published Friday, shows that immigration has become the most important issue facing the 28-nation bloc, ahead of the tough economic situation. After polling with 24 percent last fall, it shot up a full 14 points to 38 percent as the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean grabbed headlines across the continent.

It was seen as the most important issue in 20 of the 28 member states, including major EU nations Germany, France and Britain.

Raf Casert in Brussels contributed

Rob Stothard/Getty ImagesChildren run to watch ferry workers burning tyres on a road leading to the port of Calais on July 31, 2015 in Calais, France.

Migrants rushed the tunnel linking France and England repeatedly for a second night on Wednesday and one man was crushed by a truck in the chaos, deepening tensions surrounding the thousands of people camped in this northern French port city.

Eurotunnel said it had blocked more than 37,000 such attempts by migrants to reach Britain since January.

There were conflicting numbers of people involved Wednesday, ranging from 150 to as many as 1,200. But French authorities and the company agreed there had been about 2,000 attempts on each of two successive nights.

The numbers have been growing as has the sense of crisis in recent weeks, spurred by new barriers around the Eurotunnel site, labour strife that turned the rails into protest sites for striking workers, and an influx of desperate migrants.

Many British officials have expressed growing alarm at what they see as a potential influx of foreigners, although it’s not clear how many people have successfully made the passage. Nine migrants have died in the attempt since June, said France’s interior minister.

“This exceptional migrant situation has dramatic human consequences,” said Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve. “Calais is a mirror of conflicts tearing up regions of the world.”

HILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/Getty ImagesMigrants walk along railway tracks at the Eurotunnel terminal on July 28, 2015 in Calais-Frethun.

About 25 migrants were seen getting off a public bus in Calais on Wednesday with a police officer who left them by the side of the road. Several said they were returning from a night of trying to cross the English Channel.

“(We) come from train here and tomorrow, inshallah, try again in the train,” said an Eritrean who would not give his name as he planned further attempts to reach England.

Natacha Bouchart, mayor of Calais, said about 150-250 migrants tried repeatedly overnight to reach the Eurotunnel. French officials said it was the second night of mass attempts on the tunnel. Gilles Debove, a police union official, counted about 2,000 attempts for a second night running. Debove said officers pushing back the migrants counted between 750 and 1,200 people.

PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/Getty ImagesMigrants who successfully crossed the Eurotunnel terminal walk on the side of the railroad as they try to reach a shuttle to Great Britain, on July 28, 2015 in Frethun, northern France.

Bouchart told France Info radio migrants are trying to reach England from France “at all costs” — first crossing a busy highway and then trying to stow away on trucks waiting to board trains. She says Britain, France and the Eurotunnel need to work together on the issue.

The man killed overnight, believed to be a Sudanese man in his mid-20s, was crushed by a truck as he tried to stow away, Debove told The Associated Press.

Related

Cargo trucks were lined up overnight for several kilometres (miles) leading to the Eurotunnel freight loading zone, some of them stuck on a highway overpass above one of the many makeshift migrant camps. In a tweet, Eurotunnel said passenger trains were delayed an hour because of the overnight activity.

The company called for help from both the French and British governments.

PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/Getty ImagesA picture taken on July 29, 2015 shows trucks blocked at the entrance to the Eurotunnel in Coquelles.

“It’s become a phenomenon which is beyond our means,” said spokesman John Keefe. “We’re just a small transport company operating in a little corner of Europe.”

Keefe said attacks on the fences are organized. “This is very clearly criminal gangs or human traffickers who co-ordinate attacks on the fences,” he said.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, speaking during his visit to Singapore, described the crisis as “very concerning,” but that there was no point in “pointing fingers of blame.” Other British officials blamed the government in France, where officials saidEurotunnel also needed to do more.

The British government has agreed to an extra 7 million pounds ($11 million) of funding for measures to improve security at Calais.

PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/Getty ImagesMigrants from Sudan build a hut at a site dubbed "new jungle", where migrants trying to cross the Channel to reach Britain have camped out around the northern French port of Calais, on July 29, 2015.

The Conservative Party lawmaker for Folkestone, Damian Collins, said French authorities needed to better secure their side of the tunnel. Cazeneuve said 120 government security forces were being dispatched immediately to Calais.

“They have allowed people willingly to break into the Channel Tunnel site. I can’t believe they would be that lax in protecting an airport or another sensitive facility,” Collins said. “But that has happened constantly throughout the summer.”

The tunnel is studded with high-tech equipment to detect migrants, who increasingly have headed to the trains as the Calais port also increases security. Philippe Wannesson, who runs an association in support of the migrants, questioned whether the attempts were organized, saying the varying nationalities make that unlikely.

Migrants have continued to press northward, fleeing war, dictatorship and poverty in Africa and the Middle East.

Two ships unloaded in Italy on Wednesday, one carrying 435 passengers and 14 bodies and another with 692 migrants.

“First you must choose your base notes, the strongest part of the perfume which could last even overnight,” Nestler said as she picked out about two dozen varied male and female scents for me to sample.

I narrowed these down to wood moss, wood mix, sandalwood and vanilla, then filled half of a 100-millilitre vial in the proportions Nestler had chosen.

“Now come the heart notes, which last several hours,” she said. “You must try these scents combined with the base note combination. You want to find harmony.” I settled on rose petals, ocean, marine notes, pomegranate and bamboo.

Vladimir Melnik/FotoliaGrasse is the perfume capital of France.

“Finally, you must decide on your peak notes – the first impression of the perfume which lasts perhaps only 20 minutes,” Nestler said as she chose another selection for me.

This time I picked lychee, bitter lemon and grapefruit – to help balance the ocean and woodsy fragrance blend I’d created up to that point.

Et voila, I had created my own perfume (Galimard keeps a record for re-ordering) and earned my diploma as an Honourary Master Parfumeur. The two-hour workshop experience costs about $60.

And if this isn’t enough perfume for you, stay like I did at Hotel du Clos in nearby Le Rouret – with its own fragrant garden and Michelin-starred restaurant, Clos Saint Pierre.

OK, now if you have only a limited time, here are other lesser-known but not-to-be missed highlights along the Côte d’Azur:

Elena Belyaeva/FotoliaSeen from up high, Cannes, France is scenic eye candy on the Côte d'Azur. But much more awaits offthe beaten track - from wineries to galleries to museums to shopping.

Cannes

It’s fun to try to identify the famous movies and actors painted on the walls around town, reflecting the world-renowned Cannes Film Festival. But you can also have a cooking lesson at Les Apprentis Gourmets (I learned not to stir the meat while it’s browning), eat socca (seasoned chickpea flour crepe cooked in fired oven), taste the award-winning pastries at Intuitions and take a short boat trip to car-less St Honorat Island and l’Abbaye de Lérins, where Cistercian monks have produced their wine for centuries.

Check out the brand name shops and galleries along the waterfront La Croisette boulevard – but then also go back a few blocks to where the locals shop. Stay at the historic Hotel Splendid, with – indeed – a splendid view of the city and ocean.

FotoliaMenton on the French Riviera, is a treasure of museums and gardens.

Menton

Whiz east along the autoroute to Menton, just short of the Italian border (take cash, credit cards don’t always work to pay the tolls), or go by train or bus. Meet friendly staff at the Napoleon, another beachfront hotel; realize that “small portions” are two words not in Aldo Campani’s vocabulary asking for a tasting menu at Les Sablettes Beach.

Check out manageable-size museums (Palais Carnoles, Musée Jean Cocteau – plus the city hall marriage room decorated by Cocteau), lush gardens (Maria Serena) and the view from the Old Cemetery of Menton where William Webb Ellis, credited with inventing the game of rugby, is buried.

Cap d’Ail

Local hotels have character, but for a change it’s also good to stay at, for example, the waterfront Marriott here with a view of all the harbour action.

Then visit the little-known Villa les Camélias with its mementoes of bygone days and people including famous visitors like Winston Churchill.

La Turbie

History comes to life (and provides a wonderful view) at the 2,000-year-old Roman Trophy of Augustus monument; the outdoor market has the sweet, juicy, heart-shaped coeur de pigeon cherries; La Cave Turbiasque takes the food and adds those famous French sauces and flavours.

Mike GrenbyÉze is a medieval village spread over beach front, middle and high cliffside roads.

Éze

You definitely want to explore this medieval village of art and gastronomy built on three levels:

3. At 700 metres, where I stayed in the peaceful (and very reasonable: about $100 a night) Hôtel Hermitage, adjacent to a national park.

Beaulieu-sur-Mer

Why go to Greece when you can visit the Kérylos Greek Villa reconstruction to see how the Greeks lived in the second century BC – and where archaeologist Théodore Reinach and family often spent their holidays?

Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat

Feast on super-fresh seafood at the harbourfront Cabane de l’Ecailler, then learn about preservation of marine mammals in the area with a cruise on the Santo Sospir sailboat.

Villefranche-sur-Mer

Work up an appetite walking around the 16th century citadel and the old town, sip organic wine with a meal of cold cuts at la Cave Nature, then retire to the Hôtel Brise Marine with its view of harbour and hills, framed by palm trees and massive purple bougainvillea – and with perfect attention to detail at breakfast, from the table setting and variety/quality of food to the multicoloured egg cups and egg timers.

Mike GrenbyExperience the beach in Nice with a walk along the fabled Promenade des Anglais, or tour the town on a little train or topless bus.

And so my 10-day tour ended. I felt I had experienced almost everything the Côte d’Azur/French Riviera is famous for – plus so many of those extras only local knowledge can provide: from perfume to Picasso to pigeon-heart cherries.

The writer was a guest of Côte d’Azur Regional Tourism Board. No one on the board read or approved of this article before publication.

Former Vancouver Sun money columnist Mike Grenby is a travel writer who teaches journalism at Bond University on Australia’s Gold Coast.

French bathers have accused the Saudi royal family of commandeering a public Riviera beach — a favourite among nudists — for their own private use during a forthcoming visit.

Residents are threatening to sue the Saudis over an attempt to block an underpass leading to the public Mirandole beach at Vallauris — between Antibes and Cannes — with fencing.

They are also furious that workers have begun illegal construction work on a huge concrete slab that is apparently being built on the sand especially for the visit.

Under French law, the beach is normally open to local bathers, with part of it reserved for nudists. A neighbouring villa is reportedly owned by Muhammad bin Fahd, the eldest surviving son of the late King Fahd, who bought the property about 20 years ago.

The dust and the noise are stopping us from enjoying this idyllic place

“It happened on Friday between midday and 2 p.m.,” Daniel Guileminot, a nearby resident, told Nice Matin. “Workers poured a slab of concrete right on the sand. They erected fences around it and works are continuing,” he said. “The dust and the noise are stopping us from enjoying this idyllic place.”

He added that workers had even advised one woman to make the most of the beach now, “because soon there’ll be no access at all.”

Another resident said that the builders had told him that they were working for the Saudi royal family. “They advised me not to hang around in the area for long.”

Blandine Ackermann, the president of the Association for the Defence of the Golfe-Juan and Vallauris Environment, threatened to file a legal complaint unless the beach remained open and was restored to its original condition.

“This concrete slab is taking up half the beach. It’s an outrage,” she told The Daily Telegraph. She added: “If King Fahd’s son feels unsafe on the beach then he should stay in his villa. Already the property has very high walls and is totally closed. It’s a fortress.

“He never swims anyway. I’ve never seen anyone from the villa swim there. They have decided to annex part of the beach but it doesn’t belong to them. We’re not in Saudi Arabia here,” she said. “They think they can do here what they do at home, but we must defend this coastline, even if the law is very poorly respected.”

This is by no means the first run-in between locals and the Saudi royal family at Vallauris.

In 1995, King Fahd lost a legal battle to close a coastal path that ran close to his property and was ordered to remove a machine gun pointing out to sea. He was also blocked from building a parking bay for his yacht.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/french-riviera-beach-battle-pits-nudists-against-saudi-royals/feed3stdfrench-rivieraThe best jazz clubs in Paris: City of love continues to breathe life into music born in Americahttp://news.nationalpost.com/life/travel/the-best-jazz-clubs-in-paris
http://news.nationalpost.com/life/travel/the-best-jazz-clubs-in-paris#commentsTue, 30 Jun 2015 13:45:42 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=808504

It was after midnight at Le Duc des Lombards and the jam session was warming up. A just-assembled quartet toyed with the jazz standard Cherokee, volleying solos until the melody was barely discernible.

Upstarts holding drumsticks and saxophone cases lined up on the stairs to rotate in.

In the back, European and American musicians kissed hello and slapped backs. French stars Jacky Terrasson and Stephane Belmondo stopped by after their show at Sunside while American bassist Burniss Travis stepped onstage for a song or two. In dim blue-black light, the audience was packed into banquettes and café tables, chatting throughout and applauding each solo. Outside, the streets of Chatelet were quiet and bistros locked up, but Le Duc des Lombards kept humming until 4 a.m. For proof that Paris is a jazz town, come to the Duc on a Saturday night. But dispense with nostalgic notions of Montmartre cabarets or Louis Armstrong in Paris Blues. Sure, you can hear stylish chanteuses and big bands, but the city is also a hub for contemporary jazz. Over two weeks hitting the clubs last year, I heard just about everything in that category, from bebop at L’Improviste to avant-jazz at La Java to Brazilian at the Bab-Ilo. Gypsy jazz, France’s own contribution to the genre, thrives. Unlike Americans, who largely view jazz as a relic, the French host countless festivals and are willing to shell out for tickets. The music is more popular here than in its homeland.

Becky Dalzell/For The Washington PostMusicians at Le Duc des Lombards jazz club in Paris. Internationally known, Le Duc offers two concerts by the same artist: at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., much like New York clubs.

Listening to jazz in Paris isn’t like ordering a Big Mac or picking up some other American import. It’s experiencing a century-old part of French culture. “For me, jazz is very much linked to France, and France is linked to jazz,” says Lucie Buathier, who organizes concerts with the Paris Jazz Club, a promotional group.

Jazz is a vibrant part of the city’s nightlife, evidenced by some 600 concerts each month, far more than anywhere besides New York.

Jazz arrived in France during the First World War when James Reese Europe led an army-band tour across the country, kicking off a dance-hall craze. In the 1920s, black artists migrated to Paris, gathering in Montmartre. Dancer Josephine Baker dazzled clubgoers in Pigalle; Langston Hughes worked as a busboy nearby. The soundtrack was jazz.

But it was around the Second World War that jazz became embedded in the French psyche. During the war, the Vichy government banned American music, but you could still hear jazz in Paris: bands just translated titles into French. Jazz became associated with the United States, freedom and the resistance. In 1945, it was the sound of liberation.

As the bebop style emerged and jazz appreciation waned in North America, the music took off in France.

To black Americans, it was the city of Paris that equalled freedom. Finding it a welcoming refuge from the Civil Rights era, musicians such as Sidney Bechet and Bud Powell moved here. They mingled with existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre in the jazz caves of St. Germain-des-Pres. Miles Davis fell in love with Sartre’s muse, Juliette Greco, and wrote the score for Louis Malle’s film Ascenseur pour l’echafaud. That heyday has passed, but its legacy endures.

Some of the storied “caves” are still around and are an atmospheric place to start a jazz tour. Just off the Seine in the Latin Quarter, the Caveau de la Huchette has hosted jazz since 1946.

Push past the drunken crowds on the street and you’ll enter a smoke-stained warren of vaulted arches and narrow stone stairways. The building, dating to the 16th century, has served as a meeting place to such secret orders as the Masons. In the 1950s and ’60s, it was a popular club for bebop, drawing Art Blakey and Lionel Hampton.

Becky Dalzell/For The Washington PostThe Bab-Ilo jazz club in Paris. Jazz is hotter in Paris than it is in the States, after becoming linked to ideas of freedom and the resistance during the Second World War.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/life/travel/the-best-jazz-clubs-in-paris/feed0stdDrummer Charlie Watts, bassist Dave Green and pianist Ben Waters do a sound check before a concert with their band The A, B, C, D of Boogie Woogie at Le Duc des Lombards in Paris.Becky Dalzell/For The Washington PostBecky Dalzell/For The Washington PostFrench terror suspect took selfie with beheading victim, sent it to Canadian number: officialshttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/french-terror-suspect-took-selfie-with-beheading-victim-sent-it-to-canadian-number-officials
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/french-terror-suspect-took-selfie-with-beheading-victim-sent-it-to-canadian-number-officials#commentsSat, 27 Jun 2015 18:48:40 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=811779

FONTAINES-SUR-SAONE, France — The top suspect in the beheading of a businessman that French authorities are calling a terrorist attack took a “selfie” photo with the slain victim and sent the image via WhatsApp to a Canadian mobile phone number, officials said Saturday.

French investigators were working to confirm the identity of the recipient, but weren’t able to immediately confirm media reports that it was an unspecified person now in Syria, where the radical Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has seized territory, the security officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing.

Leading suspect Yassine Salhi, a truck driver with a history of radical Islamic ties, as well as his sister and wife remained in custody in the city of Lyon a day after he allegedly crashed a truck into an U.S.-owned chemical warehouse and hung his employer’s severed head on a factory gate, officials have said.

One of the security officials said the selfie was forwarded via WhatsApp, the globally popular instant messaging system owned by Facebook, to a phone number in Canada.

No group immediately claimed responsibility. The severed head appeared to mimic ISIL’s practice of beheading prisoners and displaying their heads for all to see, and came days after the militants urged attacks during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. French authorities say Salhi had links to radical Salafists in the past.

AP Photo/Michel EulerA spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor's office says one of the four suspects detained over an explosion and beheading in southeast France has been released, while the suspected assassin isn't speaking to investigators.

Paris prosecutor’s office spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre said earlier Saturday that Salhi was refusing to speak to police investigators. She said that one of the other suspects initially arrested on Friday was released without being charged.

Investigators have not turned up any motive or possible foreign connection, Thibault-Lecuivre said. Under French anti-terrorism laws, Salhi and the women can be held up to four days before either being released or handed preliminary charges and locked up.

Separately on Saturday, hundreds of people turned out in the region to honour slain businessman Herve Cornara and denounce the violence. Dozens turned out for a minute of silence in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, the town southeast of Lyon where Friday’s attack took place at an Air Products chemicals warehouse.

Several hundred people also gathered outside a housing project in the town of Fontaines-sur-Saone to honour Cornara, 54, the manager of a transportation company that had employed Salhi since March. They recalled a kind, humble man who was active in the community of the Lyon suburb.

“He lived on the fifth floor, me on the fourth. He spoke with all the young people in the neighbourhood. He didn’t differentiate between (non-Muslim) French and Muslims,” said Leila Bouri, a 24-year-old cafeteria cashier. “If you ever had a problem, you would go see him.”

“When I heard this, I was shocked. It’s shameful,” she said. “I am a Muslim, but you can’t kill like this. It’s not who we are. In Islam, we’re not told to slit throats. We only slit the throats of sheep. You don’t slit the throats of people.”

From the English Channel to the Persian Gulf, security forces were on maximum alert Friday after suspected Islamic terrorists appeared to mount simultaneous attacks on three continents, murdering more than 80 people in Tunisia, France and Kuwait.

A decapitated head was found mounted on the fence outside a chemical factory near Lyon, France, alongside a black flag carrying Arabic inscriptions.

In Kuwait City, a suicide bomb exploded in a mosque packed with Shiite worshippers, killing at least 27.

But the deadliest attack came in Tunisia, where a gunman dressed as a tourist pulled a Kalashnikov rifle from an umbrella and opened fire on beachgoers at the Imperial Marhaba Hotel in Sousse. At least 39 people died, most of them tourists.

“We were in the pool when we heard automatic gunfire. People ran past saying there was an armed man on the beach,” read a Twitter post by John Yeoman, a British guest at the hotel who spent the attack barricaded in his room.

The hotel caters largely to foreign tourists. Among the dead were people from Ireland, Belgium, Germany and the U.K.

“He was choosing who to shoot,” one witness told Tunisian radio. “Some people, he was saying to them, ‘You go away.’ He was choosing tourists, British, French.”

Wives were killed in front of husbands, sunbathers were cut down as they sprinted to safety, and a 16-year-old British boy reportedly saw his parents and a grandparent murdered.

Matthew James, a vacationer from Wales, suffered multiple bullet wounds after using himself as a human shield to protect his fiancée.

FETHI BELAID/AFP/Getty ImagesA blood stain covers the ground in the resort town of Sousse, a popular tourist destination 140 kilometres south of the Tunisian capital, on June 26, 2015.

“He was covered in blood from the shots but he just told me to run away,” she told the British press.

On social media, Britons begged for information about missing relatives.

“Haven’t spoke to my Dad since the attack, please, please, please retweet as he is missing along with his partner,” read one widely circulated message from a man in the East Midlands.

“This is worse than terrible,” said Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi.

Tunisia cannot stand up to the Islamist threat alone, he said, but “we are determined to take the most painful measures to deal with an even more painful scourge.”

Although the three attacks have not been definitively linked, they appear to fulfill a promise by propagandists from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant that the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan would bring a “calamity” to the world’s non-Muslims.

Although the victims in Kuwait City were Muslim, the jihadists consider them heretics because they are Shiites. In a statement, ISIL said the bomb had targeted a “temple of the apostates.”

Worshippers at the Imam Sadiq Mosque were standing shoulder to shoulder in group prayer when they were interrupted by a man repeatedly screaming “Allahu Akbar” (God is great). A powerful explosion then ripped through the rear of the building.

AFP/Getty ImageKuwaiti men react over a body at the site of a suicide bombing that targeted the Shiite Al-Imam al-Sadeq mosque after it was targeted by a suicide bombing during Friday prayers on June 26, 2015, in Kuwait City.

“We couldn’t see anything, so we went straight to the wounded and tried to carry them out. We left the dead,” said Hassan al-Haddad, 21, who was among the first rescuers to arrive.

The mosque bombing was the third attack in five weeks to be claimed by a purported ISIL affiliate, the Najd Province, named for the central region of Saudi Arabia where the ultra-conservative Sunni ideology of Wahhabism originated.

Kuwaitna News via APThis image provided by Kuwaitna news shows injured people in the immediate aftermath of a deadly blast at a Shiite mosque in Kuwait City, Friday, June 26, 2015.

Kuwaiti Prime Minister Sheikh Jaber al-Mubarak al-Sabah declared the attack had been aimed at the country’s “national unity,” but the Arab nation of 3.4 million is “much stronger” than anything terrorists could deliver.

“This is a wakeup call to fight harder,“ he said.

This month, the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War forecast Ramadan was “likely to be violent” as ISIL held to a jihadist tradition of increasing attacks during the holy month.

“The first message to take from these attacks is that (ISIL) is steadily and successfully spreading beyond its territorial heartland in Syria and Iraq,” read a Friday assessment by Shashank Joshi, a Middle East expert with the Royal United Services Institute in London.

Friday’s attacks were notable in that they targeted Kuwait and Tunisia, two countries often seen as bastions of calm in the middle of war-torn regions.

Kuwait has consistently ranked as one of the world’s most peaceful Arab countries, in sharp contrast to its next-door neighbour, Iraq.

Tunisia, similarly, is one of the most secular countries in North Africa, and its switch to democracy in 2011 has been one of the few success stories of the Arab Spring.

“I believe that it is not accidental that Tunisia is among the countries attacked by terrorists,” Donald Tusk, head of the European Commission, said in Brussels.

However, the country also has no shortage of armed jihadists carrying its passports. According to an estimate this month, Tunisia has contributed more recruits to ISIL than any other country outside Iraq and Syria.

Friday’s massacre was the worst terrorist attack in Tunisia’s history, although it comes only months after a similar assault on the Bardo National Museum in Tunis, where two gunmen killed 22 mostly-foreign visitors.

Both attacks, notably, targeted the country’s critical tourist sector. Tunisia is only a two-hour flight from most major European cities, and relies on tourism for 400,000 jobs and seven per cent of its gross domestic product.

By Friday afternoon, German tour operators were allowing customers to cancel Tunisian bookings. In spite of the violence, however, planeloads of European vacationers continued to touch down at Tunisian airports.

Jawhara FM via APA body is covered after an attack on a Tunisian beach, in Sousse, Friday June 26, 2015.

In Dublin, the Irish travel agent Sunway offered 170 Tunisia-bound vacationers who were at the airport the chance to cancel. Only 59 took up the offer, according to Irish public radio.

The perpetrator in the French attack is believed to be Yassin Salhi, a 35-year-old delivery man, who was investigated for religious extremism in 2006, but who has evaded the notice of authorities since 2008.

“We have a normal family life. He goes to work and comes home. He doesn’t pick up the phone when I call, it goes to the answer machine,” Salhi’s wife told Europe 1 radio. She was arrested soon after the interview.

The victim, whose severed head was found outside a factory owned by Air Products, has been identified as Salhi’s boss at a local delivery firm.

AP Photo/Laurent CiprianiPolice officers investigate at a plant where an attack took place, Friday, June 26, 2015 in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, southeast of Lyon, France.

The gas factory was a customer of the delivery company, which is how investigators suspect Salhi was able to gain entry.

He is also believed to have started a series of small fires at the facility by setting off explosions using gas canisters. He was arrested by a firefighter and remains in custody.

“This was a terrorist attack, given that a corpse was found decapitated and with inscriptions,” said French President François Hollande.

Islamist violence also struck Syria and Somalia Friday.

Dozens of soldiers were reportedly killed in Somalia after a remote African Union base was stormed by fighters with Al-Shabaab, a jihadist group with links to al-Qaida.

FETHI BELAID/AFP/Getty ImagesTunisian medics carry a woman on a stretcher in the resort town of Sousse, a popular tourist destination 140 kilometres south of the Tunisian capital, on June 26, 2015, following a shooting attack.

An attacker with suspected ties to French Islamic radicals rammed a car into an American gas factory Friday in southeastern France, officials said, adding that a severed head and banners with Arabic inscriptions were found at the factory’s entrance. France immediately opened a terrorism investigation.

President Francois Hollande said the attack began shortly before 10 a.m. when a car made it through the gate of a gas factory in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, southeast of Lyon. The car then plowed into gas canisters, touching off an explosion that injured two people, he said, speaking in Brussels.

Three French officials say the decapitated victim found in an attack was the suspect’s employer.

“No doubt about the intention — to cause an explosion,” Hollande said, calling the attack “of a terrorist nature.”

Hollande said he is raising the security alert to the highest level for three days in the southeastern region where a suspect attacked an the gas factory.

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said a man from the Lyon region who had been flagged in 2006 for suspected ties to extremists was seized by an alert firefighter. He said several other people were also taken into custody after the attack and authorities were trying to identify the victim whose severed head was at the gate and body was found elsewhere on the factory premises.

“People who could have participated in this abject crime are in custody,” he said.

Cazeneuve said the suspect had been known to intelligence services, who had him under surveillance from 2006-08. Still, the minister said the investigation had just begun and cautioned against jumping to conclusions.

It was not clear if French authorities were searching for any more possible accomplices.

The industrial site belongs to Air Products, an American chemical company based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The company said all its employees had been accounted for and evacuated but did not say if any had been wounded.

“The site is secure. Our crisis and emergency response teams have been activated and are working closely with all relevant authorities,” the company said in a statement.

PHILIPPE DESMAZES/AFP/Getty ImagesSpecial forces of France's Research and Intervention Brigades (BRI) escort an unidentified woman as they leave the building housing the apartment of a man suspected of carrying out an attack in Saint-Priest near Lyon on Friday.

The severed head at the factory’s entrance appeared to be an echo of ISIL’s practice of beheading prisoners and displaying their heads for all to see. A security official said two flags — one white and one black, both bearing Arabic inscriptions — were found nearby.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing, said the victim was believed to have died before the suspect got a car through the factory’s gates and rammed into gas canisters Friday morning. That triggered an explosion that officials say injured two people.

A French police official says the man in custody, Yassine Salhi, is a resident in his 30s of the Lyon suburb of Saint-Priest. Police have not named his employer but say he is the head of a local transportation company.

French police say they have the suspect in custody, along with the suspect’s wife and others. Hollande says the key question is to determine whether there were any accomplices.

France’s anti-terror prosecutor said an investigation was opened into the attack, and potential charges including plotting as part of “a terrorist group.” Cazeneuve said Friday that security has been heightened at religious sites around the country.

AP Photo/Laurent CiprianiA police officers outside the plant where the attack took place Friday in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, southeast of Lyon, France.

Hollande spoke after watching TV news reports about the attack with German Chancellor Angela Merkel as both attended a European Union summit in Brussels.

France went on high alert after attacks in January against the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, a kosher grocery store and a policewoman that left 20 people dead in the Paris region, including three Islamic extremist attackers.

Since then, fears of copycat attacks have risen. One person was arrested in April after authorities said he was plotting to gun down people in churches in the Paris region.

AP Photo/Laurent CiprianiPolice officer block the area where the attack took place Friday in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier.

DOUAI, France — One day in the summer of 2010, a man was digging in his garden in northern France when he discovered a trash bag containing the remains of an infant. When he summoned the police, they found the body of another newborn. A few days later, they found more bags in the garage — with six additional small corpses.

Police contacted the house’s previous owners, and quickly discovered the horrifying explanation: Frenchwoman Dominique Cottrez confessed to secretly bearing and then killing eight of her newborns, saying she feared they were children of a long, incestuous relationship with her father.

Cottrez, a 51-year-old mother of two grown daughters, went on trial Thursday in the city of Douai, accused of multiple counts of first-degree murder of minors.

Related

Cottrez wept as she took her seat. She faces life in prison if found guilty.

Her lawyers are expected to argue that she was a victim of rape and incest, and ask for a lesser sentence.

The worst infanticide case in modern French history stunned the country when the bodies were discovered in and around the Cottrez’ former home in 2010.

Cottrez’s obesity appeared to hide the pregnancies, which went unnoticed by her husband, children, neighbours, colleagues — and even doctors at a nearby hospital.

AP Photo / Michel SpinglerThe worst infanticide case in modern French history stunned the country when the babies were discovered in the family garden in 2010.

Dozens of forensic and psychiatric experts, police investigators and witnesses, including her husband, daughters and siblings, are scheduled to testify to help understand the incomprehensible, and perhaps to help the defendant open up.

A withdrawn, secretive nurse’s aide, Cottrez told investigators she was raped by her father, first when she was 8 and repeatedly through her childhood and teenage years, according to judicial documents. She later entered a long, incestuous relationship with him as an adult, including after she married, and said that it became consenting — and even said she was in love with her father more than she was with her husband.

Her father died in 2007.

One of the first witnesses called to the stand Thursday is Leonard Meriaux, who bought the Cottrez family house and discovered the first corpse in 2010. He called police, who found another in the garden.

From one interrogation to another, the police went from surprise to stupor. Cottrez first admitted killing the two infants found in the garden. Then she herself informed the investigators that several other bodies were in the garage of the house, but she didn’t know how many exactly, according to court documents.

She told the investigating judge that she had never used contraception or had an abortion because of a phobia of doctors. She also said she didn’t keep the babies because she was afraid that they were the results of her incestuous relations with her father. She said the killing had become a “means of contraception,” according to the judicial documents.

She said she told her father of the eight pregnancies and the eight murders, and investigators believe he could have helped her hide some of the bodies.

The others, I didn’t look, I didn’t want to. But when they were in the garage, when it was cold, I went there and covered them with a blanket

The death she described the most clearly is the first one, in 1989. She said she smothered the baby boy with sheets, placed him in a trash bag that she had prepared in advance, and put the bag in her wardrobe, according to the documents.

The second killing happened when she was hospitalized for an epilepsy seizure. She said she gave birth in the hospital toilet, strangled the child, wrapped it in plastic sheeting and towels, placed it in the closet of her hospital room and then brought it back home, hidden in her garment bag.

Her memories became blurred for the following births and deaths. The last infanticide was in 2000.

Her husband and daughters say they noticed foul odours in various parts of the house, but thought they
came from sewage, or their dog, or even their father’s feet.

Cottrez was released from jail in 2012 after spending two years in temporary detention. In a January interview with a local newspaper, she said: “I never gave first names to the babies. The first one, I saw he was a baby boy. The others, I didn’t look, I didn’t want to. But when they were in the garage, when it was cold, I went there and covered them with a blanket. ”

The verdict is expected next Thursday.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/dominique-cottrez-on-trial-for-killing-of-her-8-babies-in-worst-infanticide-case-in-modern-french-history/feed0stdAPTOPIX_France_Babies_KilledAP Photo / Michel SpinglerThe forgotten story of how Napoleon wanted to start a new life in Americahttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/the-forgotten-story-of-how-napoleon-wanted-to-start-a-new-life-in-america
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/the-forgotten-story-of-how-napoleon-wanted-to-start-a-new-life-in-america#commentsFri, 19 Jun 2015 15:38:00 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=801331

“God was bored with Napoleon,” mused the French writer Victor Hugo, and so the indomitable French commander, strategist and emperor went on to lose the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815. The bicentennial marking the decisive clash between Napoleon’s forces and a combined army of British and Prussians is later this week and has already been the subject of numerous commemorations, including a series of historical reenactments and a controversial coin.

Napoleon’s defeat on a field in what’s now Belgium signaled the end of his imperial ambitions in Europe and paved the way for nearly a century of British dominance in global politics.

But in the aftermath of Waterloo, the coalition forces ranged against him grappled with a far more immediate question: What to do with the diminutive Corsican?

Earlier in the same year, Napoleon had escaped imprisonment on the Mediterranean isle of Elba, and returned triumphantly to Paris. His enemies — from the victorious British to opponents within France — were determined to prevent any chance of him pulling off the same stunt again.

The vanquished general, too, seemed to be resigned to his fate. But he looked west to new lands for sanctuary. Napoleon’s desire to avoid life in British captivity by emigrating to the United States is the subject of an ongoing exhibition near Paris, held at a chateau that once belonged to him, as reported by Agence France Presse.

“Where am I to go? To England? My abode there would be ridiculous or disquieting,” Napoleon is said to have told a confidante in the days after Waterloo and his own abdication as Emperor of the French. “America would be more suitable; I could live there with dignity.”

He waited aboard a vessel near the western port of Rochefort, hoping to win British clearance for a life in dignified exile on the other side of the Atlantic. His baggage included enough furniture and crockery for imagined residences in both the city and country, as well as books and maps detailing the United States.

But the authorization never came. Napoleon, knowing that the political wind was against him in France too, surrendered himself to the British on July 15, 1815. He was then sent to the remote, gray Atlantic isle of St. Helena, where he died just six years later of what’s suspected to be stomach cancer. (His brother, Joseph, did manage to escape 10 days later to the United States by using a false passport.)

The allure of the Americas was strong for Napoleon and many of his supporters. The French emperor had connections to the New World — it was the birthplace of his late wife, who was born in the rich, plantation colony that’s now Haiti. Before selling off the Louisiana territory to the U.S. in 1803, Napoleon had once harbored dreams of building a grand continental empire, with New Orleans as its metropolitan center.

By 1815, that conquering zeal had apparently burned out, and he seemed keen to abandon politics for new pursuits.

“When Napoleon imagined his life in the United States, it was as a private individual and devotee of science,” writes Ines Murat, author of “Napoleon and the American Dream.” According to one account, related by NPR, as Prussian troops approached his residence near Paris, Napoleon was already reading a book about the botany and geography of the Americas. Among the attendants enlisted to join the defeated emperor was a French astronomer and physicist.

When Napoleon imagined his life in the United States, it was as a private individual and devotee of science

Given his past, it’s hard to believe Napoleon, the inheritor of the French Revolution, would have been so quiet. Other accounts suggest he may have hoped to help lead republican uprisings in Spain’s marquis American colonies, such as Venezuela and Mexico. Napoleonic France was one of the few European friends of Latin America’s revolutionaries, and its daring commander had, for a time, inspired opponents of Europe’s old monarchies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Even though Napoleon never reached the Americas, hundreds of Bonapartists did; many signed up to fight in the bloody wars that birthed South America’s independent states. Others journeyed to New Orleans and, among other activities, plotted to rescue their captured leader, turned to privateering and smuggling, and attempted to establish their own colonies in the American South.

These include two failed Bonapartist outposts in Alabama and Texas.

“I have become a man of the woods, wandering in the forests of Georgia,” wrote Louis Lauret, a former captain in Napoleon’s Guard of Honor, in a letter in 1830. Long gone were his own illusions of a hopeful American future.

“[I] avoid the sight of the world, which fills me with horror,” he wrote.

An extraordinary brouhaha has erupted in France over a France 2 television documentary revealing that many prepackaged meals sold in the country contain cheese-like substances made from palm oil and other “vegetable fat-based substitutes.”

The stuff is not sold overtly on store shelves, you understand, but rather is hidden in pre-made meals, including pizza, lasagna and burgers, which the French of all people have taken to eating in vast quantities — even in restaurants. As one horrified French restaurateur put it, “this is an area where we French should be setting an example, but instead we’re victims of the global craze for junk food.” And if France falls, can anyone long resist?

Perhaps not. Purveyors of food-like substances know the real money is in processing things not selling them fresh and natural, and they employ astounding ingenuity in tinkering with the chemistry of snacks and fast food to make it more tempting. Yet the better they get at it, the less genuine satisfaction we derive from our meals.

To be sure, the dynamic entrepreneurship of the global food industry deserves our admiration. And yes, fast food is often cheaper and more convenient, at the retail and wholesale level. But it panders to increasingly depraved culinary tastes and even contributes to them with its endless food science and offerings made in a plant not from one. As with every horrifying consumer purchase from fashion to the vice trade, the problem is not their ingenuity in peddling it but our avidity in purchasing it.

And here we come to the most troubling aspect of the story. Despite their famous appreciation for genuine food and genuine eating, slow meals with friends and family, a fresh-baked baguette every day and (as de Gaulle famously complained) 246 varieties of cheese, most Frenchmen and Frenchwomen didn’t notice the “50-50” on their microwaved pizza until they saw it on TV. Like the California man suing a big brewer because a “craft beer” was mass-produced, they should instead reflect that to favour artisanal food in principle without being able to taste the difference in practice is mere snobbery.

Julia Child shocked both nations when she proposed to introduce Americans to the basics of French cuisine. Alas, the opposite would appear to have occurred. If there is a French equivalent to “un-American activities,” eating artificial cheese might well qualify and serving it surreptitiously certainly would.

It is in France, then, that the fight against fake food must begin. Last week, the French government launched an official campaign to make their country more tourist-friendly. No doubt the plan is to encourage greater courtesy, but since a surly waiter is as much a French classic as fine cheese, and France leads the world in tourist visits, we would advise them to stick with their strengths. Including outstanding real food prepared and eaten as if it mattered.

There are of course calls for regulation of labels and so on. But at the risk of sounding rather Anglo-Saxon, what the French (and all of us) need to do is stop eating frozen pizza. French food writer Anne Inquimbert has called on “consumers to mobilize to save our great cheese, just like our traditional bread and our fine wines.” As so they should. Aux armes, gastronomes! Formez vos reblochons!

So let us cheer on the French as they seek to restore their grand culinary tradition, not only le cordon bleu but a general folk appreciation of good food eaten in good company. We might even imitate them. Except the part about the waiters.

ROME — Italy has reacted with indignation to comments from Segolene Royal, the French ecology minister, that the chocolate spread Nutella should be boycotted because it leads to deforestation in the tropics.

Royal urged people to stop eating the hazelnut spread that is beloved of generations of schoolchildren because it is made from palm oil, which comes from vast plantations in south-east Asia.

“We have to replant a lot of trees because there is massive deforestation that also leads to global warming. We should stop eating Nutella, for example, because it’s made with palm oil,” she said in an interview on the French television network Canal+.

“Oil palms have replaced trees, and therefore caused considerable damage to the environment,” she said.

Ferrero, the Italian chocolate company which produces the spread, should use products other than palm oil to make Nutella, she said.

The trans-Alpine tiff was the subject of lively debate on Italian radio on Wednesday, with Italians pointing out that many French food products were also made with palm oil and that Nutella was being unfairly demonized.

The row added to an already high level of tension between Paris and Rome after the French closed their border with Italy, leaving hundreds of migrants and refugees in limbo and sleeping rough on a rocky stretch of the Riviera.

Many had reached Italy after crossing the Mediterranean from Libya and hoped to reach countries in northern Europe.

Commenting on Twitter, he said: “I’ll be having bread and Nutella tonight for dinner.”

Roberto Calderoli, a senator with the centre-Right Northern League, a party whose defence of Italian values and products often verges on the xenophobic, also came to the defence of the chocolate spread.

“We grew up with Nutella and we’ll never give it up,” he said. “If the French don’t want to eat Nutella, too bad for them, they don’t know what they’re missing.”

Michele Anzaldi, a member of the ruling Democratic Party, said Ms Royal should apologize for her remarks, which he called “a grave blunder.”

The debate even made it to the front page of Italy’s respected and sober financial daily, Il Sole 24 Ore, which pointed out that palm oil was not just used in Nutella, but in a huge range of products, from biscuits and chocolate to ice cream.

“Boycotting Nutella will not slow down the consumption of palm oil, nor will it bring back the rainforests,” the paper said in an editorial.

Ferrero issued a statement in which it insisted that its palm oil was sourced from environmentally-sustainable plantations.

The company said that 100 per cent of its palm oil came from certified plantations.

GREENPEACE/AFP/Getty This undated handout image released by environmental action group Greenpeace on February 9, 2011 shows a network of tracks in a deforested area for oil palm plantations near Kuala Kwayan, west of Palangkaraya town in Central Kalimantan on Indonesian Borneo island.

Ferrero said it had signed up to an international agreement on sustainable palm oil and aimed to strike a balance between respect for the environment, the needs of local communities and the economic benefits of growing palm oil trees.

The company sources 80 per cent of its palm oil from Malaysia, with the rest coming from Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Brazil – all countries where extensive deforestation has occurred.

Apparently stung by the criticism in Italy, Royal appeared to backtrack on her remarks on Twitter.

“A thousand apologies for the controversy over Nutella,” she wrote in a tweet on Wednesday afternoon. “I agree about highlighting progress (in sustainable palm oil production).”

In 2012, a group of French politicians tried to introduce a 300 per cent tax on palm oil, arguing that it was high in fat and that its cultivation resulted in the clearing of rainforest. The measure was defeated.

It may be sugary and fattening, but Nutella remains a jealously-guarded institution in Italy.

There was national mourning in February when Michele Ferrero, the patriarch of the eponymous chocolate conglomerate, died at the age of 89. He was Italy’s richest man, with his family’s fortune estimated at around £15 billion (C$29 billion).

In a tribute, Sergio Mattarella, Italy’s president, called the chocolate baron “a born entrepreneur,” praising him for introducing products such as Ferrero Rocher chocolates, Tic-Tacs and Kinder Surprise eggs.

It was Ferrero’s father, a small-time pastry maker, who laid the groundwork for the Nutella recipe.

During the Second World War, when cocoa was in short supply, he hit on the idea of mixing in hazelnuts, which are plentiful in northern Italy, where the company is based.

Related

The first kits were given away for free, and investors were actually paid for their initial batches of cheese, convincing numerous people to invest huge amounts of money.

Many people mortgaged their houses, cashed in their savings, and sold their properties to be able to participate in the alleged pyramid scheme, which relied on initial investors who were promised gifts and money for signing up their friends and family. Some also gave up their jobs to dedicate their time solely to cheese-making.

The alleged scam started in 2005 when van Erpe began organizing huge conferences in Santiago, where she urged people to buy her wonder product. She apparently told potential costumers that companies such as L’Oréal would buy the cheese to use in whitening creams and other cosmetics products used by the likes of celebrities such as Michael Jackson.

As it turned out, the cheese never even left the country. It was found rotting in a warehouse.

Van Erpe’s trial started on Monday in Paris, where Chilean authorities are pursuing her since extradition to Chile wasn’t possible.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/a-74-year-old-woman-is-standing-trial-for-allegedly-orchestrating-a-15-million-magic-cheese-scam/feed0stdLancashire_cheese‘I thought he was armed, I shot first': French farmer on trial for killing ‘truffle thief’ he found rooting through his landhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/i-thought-he-was-armed-i-shot-first-french-farmer-on-trial-for-killing-truffle-thief-he-found-on-his-land
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/i-thought-he-was-armed-i-shot-first-french-farmer-on-trial-for-killing-truffle-thief-he-found-on-his-land#commentsWed, 27 May 2015 16:28:36 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=782009

PARIS — A French farmer went on trial Tuesday for murdering a man he thought was stealing his prized truffles in a case that has lifted the lid on a “black diamond war” over one of the world’s most expensive delicacies.

Laurent Rambaud, 37, faces a maximum of 30 years in prison for killing Ernest Pardo, 42, a hospital worker who he shot twice with a pump-action shotgun after finding him digging in his truffle patch with a dog in Dec 2010.

The shooting took place in Grignan, a small town in the Rhone valley near one of France’s largest truffle markets, where at Christmas time the fungi can fetch over C$1,300 a piece. Rambaud’s arrest on murder charges caused fury in the southern Drome region, where locals lent their support to the farmer, saying he was only defending his livelihood and felt “threatened.”

Rambaud, from a respected local family and head of the region’s young farmers’ association, allegedly sat in wait for the suspected thief. He surprised Pardo who was carrying a small pick, which the farmer says he mistook for a weapon.

Rambaud opened fire but insists that he had no intention of killing the alleged poacher, who police said was an experienced truffle hunter who sold his finds at local markets. “I thought he was armed, I shot first. I committed the irreparable. Even with a gun on your own land, at night you get frightened to death,” he told the court in Valence.

His arrest caused protests from fellow truffle farmers, many of whom said they were facing a near-impossible task defending their black truffles from thieves bent on taking the fungi and their dogs.

Friends of Pardot staged their own protest in nearby Saint-Paul-Trois-Chateaux, saying that he “didn’t deserve to be killed like a dog.”

Alain Fort, Rambaud’s lawyer, said his client was “the antithesis of a person who would deliberately shoot someone over a handful of truffles.” He added: “This is a man who felt in danger at night in his truffle patch. He was scared.”

This is a man who felt in danger at night in his truffle patch. He was scared

The shooting, he added, took place during a “truffle war,” with local farmers fighting a losing battle to guard their fungi from thieves round the clock.

The mayor of Grignan, Bruno Durieux, told the court that truffle theft was an increasing problem in the region.

“Over the previous five years, there had been a clear rise in the number of thefts with professional methods,” he said.

Stephane Simonin, the lawyer for Pardo’s widow and three children, said on “that night, at that time, Rambaud went to that spot because he knew he was likely to cross someone who people had been talking about for some time.”

Pardo was “looking for truffles for others. It is done in the region,” he said.

Truffles, which grow wild around the roots of oak, hazel and lime trees, are one of the most expensive foods by weight. Rambaud’s father also faces charges of tampering with a crime scene by replacing the unlicensed shotgun with his hunting rifle. The trial continues.

PARIS — French investigators have opened a probe after an Air France jet with some three dozen people on board narrowly avoided hitting the highest mountain in central Africa in early May, according to information published by France’s BEA air accident agency.

The Boeing 777 jet was making a short evening trip from Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea, to Cameroon’s largest city of Douala where it was due to pick up more passengers en route to Paris, when it ran into bad weather on May 2.

While cruising at about 9,000 feet, the pilots of Flight 953 diverted northwards to avoid storm clouds, but their route back towards Douala took their jetliner towards the 13,000-foot Mount Cameroun, the BEA and the airline said.

That triggered an emergency warning from an automated ground-proximity warning system urging the crew to take avoiding action, the BEA said in a regular update of new investigations.

Related

The crew climbed straight to “Flight Level 130″ or about 13,000 feet before continuing to Douala. Mount Cameroon, an active volcano, stands at 4,090 metres or 13,400 feet.

Air France said the crew of Flight 953 had reacted in accordance with their training and the plane’s manuals but that they had been taken off flying duties for more training.

Pending the airline’s own investigation, they are receiving “pedagogical, managerial and medical support,” a spokesman said.

Air France said it had also issued extra briefings to all crews about the landscape around the coastal city of Douala.

There were 23 passengers, three pilots and 10 cabin crew or 36 people in total on board the jet, the spokesman said, adding passengers would not have been aware of the cockpit scare.

However, the BEA, which counted 37 people on board, said it was investigating the avoidance maneuver as a “serious incident,” pointing to a possible near-disaster.

Under aviation protocols, a serious incident is defined as an event in which an accident “nearly occurred.”

According to the United Nations aviation agency, which sets rules for investigations, the classification may be used when a ground collision, for example, is only “narrowly avoided.”

The cockpit’s Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System issues a staccato command ordering pilots to “pull up” when an aircraft gets too close to the ground, except when landing.

Under aviation protocols, a serious incident is defined as an event in which an accident ‘nearly occurred’

Although latest versions of the system leave extra time to react, pilots are trained to use full thrust and pull the control stick back without delay to climb out of trouble.

French regulators were accused of dragging their feet over the use of earlier types of the device, but made it compulsory after an Airbus jet operated by Air Inter, now part of Air France, crashed into Mont Sainte-Odile in France in 1992.

In a separate incident, aviation websites reported that an Airbus A330 flown by Singapore Airlines lost power on both engines en route from Singapore to Shanghai on May 23. Power was restored after pilots staged a partial descent.

“We are in contact with the airline and Rolls-Royce to determine the cause of this incident,” an Airbus spokesman said.

Engine maker Rolls-Royce and Singapore Airlines were not immediately available for comment.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/air-france-pilots-accidentally-turn-plane-toward-africas-tallest-mountain-narrowly-miss-hitting-it/feed0stdWhite Calgary mom hopes community BBQ will stop her family from being ‘racially slurred’http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/white-calgary-mom-hopes-community-bbq-will-stop-her-family-from-being-racially-slurred
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/white-calgary-mom-hopes-community-bbq-will-stop-her-family-from-being-racially-slurred#commentsMon, 25 May 2015 17:17:53 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=780110

A Calgary mother who claimed her white family was the victim of racialized bullying in a mostly black neighbourhood hosted a community barbecue on Saturday with the hope of bringing the area’s children together.

Blair France and her husband moved into Shaganappi Village, a southwest affordable housing complex in November. But the couple says their family, which consists of two girls ages seven and 12, and an eight-month-old son, have been bullied by other children in the neighbourhood. France said there have been instances where scores of children have gathered on her lawn, screaming and throwing rocks at her family’s home.

“They have racially slurred my children,” France said. “They’ve called my children ‘white crackers,’ one boy that I found out called (my daughter) a ‘marshmallow’ and ‘white-skinned people’ and that we’re poor and stuff like that. We’re all in poverty, so we have to all understand that.”

France will be meeting with Calgary Housing this coming week. In the meantime, the family hosted a barbecue on their front lawn Saturday, drawing hundreds of children of all ages who also participated in arts and crafts.

Related

France said she wants to bridge the cultural gap in her neighbourhood.

“It’s a target issue against my family,” she said. “What I’m trying to do is prove to these people that we’re good people and that we’re good citizens towards each other and then I want them all to stop bullying and hitting each other with shoes and stop throwing rocks and stop swearing.”

Calgary Police stood by making sure the event ran smoothly.

“We’re not going to arrest and charge children, that isn’t going to solve the problem,” said Cst. Rayne Boyko. She said police run a recreational program for kids called Power Play in some affordable housing communities, which they are looking to implement for the neighbourhood of Shaganappi Village.

“Everybody has the same goal. Everybody wants to live here peacefully and for their children to be able to go out and have fun and play,” Boyko said. “The problem in a lot of communities is that if there isn’t organized recreation, they get into trouble. It’s like a schoolyard without supervision.”

The France family threw a friendly community potluck barbecue in their yard with hopes of raising awareness of, and putting a stop to the bullying.
Deborah France, 12, says that she has been bullied by neighbours since moving to an affordable housing complex near Westbook Mall in Calgary.

Beside the France family’s home is a playground with a bent basketball hoop and a broken slide. Few parents were there on Saturday afternoon, which some say is the problem in the first place.

Crystal Schick / Calgary HeraldDeborah France, 12, says that she has been bullied by neighbours since moving to an affordable housing complex near Westbook Mall in Calgary.

“I never see parents out here with the kids,” said Linda Kearns, a Calgary Housing tenant of 15 years who lives in the area.

She said the children in the area sometimes develop a “gang mentality” when they see other children behaving a certain way.

“I’ve also seen them bully each other. It’s not a black and white thing,” Kearns said. “Everybody bullies each other because there’s no one there to stop it. I get along great with the kids and I’m white, I get along great with most of the parents and I’m white. I don’t think it had anything to do with colour.”

Ian Quayle and his wife live in the complex with their five children and say they are consistently the only parents out supervising and putting a halt to violence among the children.

“I don’t call it a racial thing,” Quayle said. “There’s only, I think, in total four white families living here. I just think the kids are bored, there’s not much to do. Calgary Housing doesn’t fix stuff.”

He said Calgary Housing needs to take a “100 per cent zero tolerance” approach to the problems of the neighbourhood and make parents more aware of their children’s misbehaviour.

Minoush Rafie, the program co-ordinator for Closer to Home Community Services, an organization that runs after-school and summer camp programs for families in the area, said the bullying issues aren’t unique to Shaganappi Village.

“It’s not a matter of fundraising and putting more stuff in the village,” she said. “It can happen in any community, not necessarily because this is low-cost housing. Every community has issues but it’s up to parents to address it and how to get together and be a community.”

LONDON — With its classic red phone booth, pub, and medieval church, Harmondsworth’s centre looks quintessentially British. But the search for a twee English village isn’t what brings millions of people within a stone’s throw of its boundaries.

The attraction is neighbouring Heathrow Airport, which served 73 million travellers last year. Now Europe’s busiest airport is proposing to build a runway roughly through the centre of town, levelling the ivy-covered brick walls of the Harmondsworth Hall guest house and two-thirds of its homes. A village that traces its history to the 6th century would be forever altered, and some argue even what’s left would be uninhabitable.

“There’s no compensation package that would interest me,” said Neil Keveren, who chairs a local community group opposed to the expansion. “We have a historic village with buildings that go back 600 years. You cannot replace that. You cannot buy memories.”

Harmondsworth is under threat because London and southeastern England need more airport capacity to meet the growing demands of business travellers and tourists. Heathrow and rival Gatwick, 50 kilometres south of central London, have offered competing projects that will cost as much as £18.6 billion ($35.4 billion Canadian). Whichever proposal is selected, homes will be destroyed and surviving neighbourhoods will have to cope with increased noise, pollution and traffic.

AP Photo/Kirsty WigglesworthThis photo taken on Tuesday, May 19, 2015, shows the post office and village store in Harmondsworth in London. Residents of the village close to Heathrow Airport are campaigning against the expansion of the airport which they claim will decimate their community.

The issue is so toxic that politicians created an independent commission to weigh the options. Government officials then postponed a decision until after the May 7 election, effectively taking the matter off the political agenda, if but briefly.

The commission is set to make its recommendation as soon as next month. It will then be up to political leaders to make the final decision. A furious public relations battle has raged in advance, with placards all over London’s subway system, for example, extolling the virtues of Heathrow or Gatwick. The commission has already rejected other options, including Mayor Boris Johnson’s proposal for a new airport in the Thames Estuary.

According to the commission, all three remaining proposals, including two different plans to expand Heathrow, would meet the region’s needs, though the costs and potential benefits would vary. Gatwick, for instance, would cost an estimated £9.3 billion and boost Britain’s gross domestic product by as much as £127 billion. The most expensive Heathrow project would cost twice as much and boost GDP by up to £211 billion, the commission estimates.

Making the right decision is crucial as London seeks to retain a competitive edge.

AP Photo/Kirsty WigglesworthIn this photo taken on Tuesday, May 19, 2015, people walk through Harmondsworh Great Barn, a medieval timber framed barn built in 1426-7 in Harmondsworth in London. Residents of the village close to Heathrow Airport are campaigning against the expansion of the airport which they claim will decimate their community.

In a globalized world, airports offer the opportunity for investment bankers, lawyers, consultants and engineers to make face-to-face connections in major markets where deals are made, said John Kasarda, director of the centre for air commerce at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.

And the ability to move — and connect — faster makes a country and its economy more competitive. Opting not to expand is a tacit acknowledgement that the government is willing to have some of those jobs go to a competitor, such as Paris, Amsterdam or Dubai.

“It’s the survival of the fastest,” Kasarda said. “It’s no longer the big eating the small. It is the fast eating the slow.”

But there is a human cost, as communities like Harmondsworth and others that might be affected know all too well.

AP Photo/Kirsty WigglesworthThis photo taken on Tuesday, May 19, 2015, shows Harmondsworth Hall which will be destroyed if Heathrow Airport expands, in Harmondsworth in London. Residents of the village close to Heathrow Airport are campaigning against the expansion of the airport which they claim will decimate their community.

Heathrow external relations director Nigel Milton said he understands that some people are very upset, though he claims there are residents in Harmondsworth who support the project but might not want to come forward to support the idea. He acknowledges the local impact, but said the company would offer compensation packages — even to those whose homes would not need to be levelled but who would find themselves living next to a runway.

“We believe we are being fair,” he said.

Countries like Britain have struggled with the notion of balancing national gain with local pain. Harmondsworth and the nearby village of Sipson are “stylized examples of the challenge all big societies face: progress meets obstacles,” said Tony Travers, a professor of government at the London School of Economics.

Britain has sought to strike a balance between growth and safeguarding its heritage, and grassroots conservation movements have grown up to protect cultural landmarks. Unlike communities such as Venice in Italy, Britain hasn’t allowed beauty to hamper progress — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t taken into account.
“If Harmondsworth were not this beautiful village, this decision would be that much easier to make,” Travers said.

Local campaigners say they’ve been told the latest proposal would avoid landmarks like St. Mary’s Church, which traces its history to the mid-11th century and the Great Barn, a 15th century oak-framed behemoth — 192 feet long, 37 feet wide and 39 feet high — dubbed the “Cathedral of Middlesex” by the late poet laureate John Betjeman.

AP Photo/Kirsty WigglesworthIn this photo taken on Tuesday, May 19, 2015, Harmondsworh Great Barn, a medieval timber framed barn built in 1426-7 stands in Harmondsworth in London. Residents of the village close to Heathrow Airport are campaigning against the expansion of the airport which they claim will decimate their community.

But opponents say the proposed runway would be so close to what’s left of the village that no one would be able to stand to live there because of the noise and the bad air. In other words, there’d be a church but no congregation, said archaeological scientist Justine Bayley.

“They have no concern that they are screwing up the lives of hundreds of thousands of people for their shareholders,” she said of her village and others along the flightpath and in west London who are affected by the noise.

Keveren nods. His fury is evident as he waves a 2010 election leaflet in which Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party pledged to fight Heathrow expansion. Keveren says he feels deceived.

“My grandparents worked this land. I have war dead in the cemetery of the church. This is my home and if I am forced to leave here, who will it be for? Foreign investors,” he said spinning with outrage. “The message I would give to the world is that the British government can be bought.”

AP Photo/Kirsty WigglesworthIn this photo taken on Tuesday, May 19, 2015, cars are parked at the centre of the village in Harmondsworth in London. Residents of the village close to Heathrow Airport are campaigning against the expansion of the airport which they claim will decimate their community.

PARIS — The maker of the Airbus A400M military transport plane that crashed in Spain this month has warned air forces flying the plane to carry out checks on its electronic systems before the next flights.

Airbus Defence & Space sent the so-called Alert Operator Transmission notice to all operators of the giant turboprop airlifter on Tuesday, the company said in a statement.

The five national air forces flying the hulking grey aircraft must “perform one-time checks of the Electronic Control Units on each of the aircraft’s engines before next flight,” Airbus said. “Additional detailed checks” must be carried out if engines or ECUs are replaced in the future, Airbus said.

The cause of the crash that killed two pilots and two flight test engineers on May 9 near the city of Seville remains under investigation.

Four of the five countries that already have A400Ms – Britain, Germany, Malaysia and Turkey – grounded the plane after the crash. France, which has six, says it will only use the aircraft in urgent operations.

The 20 billion euro A400M program saw its first deliveries in 2013. Some 174 aircraft have been ordered by eight countries – including Spain – to replace their aging military transport fleets. Twelve of the aircraft were delivered as of March, with Malaysia’s air force being the most recent customer. A further five aircraft were due to be delivered to Germany this year, but Airbus has notified the German government to expect delays.

Last week Spain, where the plane undergoes final assembly, withdrew permission for test flights pending the outcome of the investigation. Two probes into the crash are ongoing, one by Spain’s development and defence ministries and a second by judicial officials in Seville.

Rachida Dati, France’s glamorous former justice minister, has hit back at the state auditor after it refused to pay for almost €9,000 (₤6,500) her ministry spent on luxury clothes, scarves, “gifts”, restaurants and patisserie while she was in office.

The Cour des Comptes ruled that the state should not pay for Hermes scarves, ties and other items, and also rejected a further €180,000 Dati’s ministry spent on “communication consulting” between 2007 and 2010, most of it going to a company run by a friend of Nicolas Sarkozy, then the French president.

Dati, whose love of designer clothes saw her appear in a Dior dress and fishnet stockings on the front page of Paris Match while in office, denied that any of the garments had been for her, saying that they were all “presents” for foreign judicial dignitaries.

One beneficiary was an “English justice minister,” she said.

Related

In its report, dated Jan 22 but which only came to public attention this week, the auditor singled out €8,959 spent on “luxury clothes, drinks, meals, purchase of patisserie, newspapers and pharmaceutical products”.

In an itemised list, the auditor underlined around €1,300 spent on “clothing accessories” and another €1,400 on “luxury gifts.” Several receipts were unsigned and many were simply described as “various.”

According to Le Point, a weekly news magazine, the auditor found that these items “had no place here.”

Dati, an MEP and mayor of Paris’s seventh arrondissement who was France’s first senior cabinet minister of North African descent, said that she was the victim of a “political cabal” of Sarkozy aides who had never liked her, and who continue to privately describe her as a “chicken thief, an Arab.”

“That’s quite enough,” she told iTele. “If they want to try and catch me out on money, bling-bling and the like, it’s not the case.”

She added: “The justice ministry never financed my personal expenses or bought me any clothes whatsoever. I didn’t live at the ministry and my spending was financed using my own money at all.”

She said the auditor “is not questioning the nature of the spending,” but is simply “saying that there are expenses concerning the justice ministry — not the minister, Rachida Dati — that were not placed in the correct accounting line.”

I did offer a Hermes scarf to an English justice minister, in the name of the ministry

Her lawyer, Aurelien Hamelle, said that “only a third” of the sum concerned high-end clothing and accessories, which were “gifts for foreign judicial delegations.”

“It’s a perfectly normal practice,” he added.

“I did offer a Hermes scarf to an English justice minister, in the name of the ministry,” Dati told Le Figaro.

“These were essentially French products that I offered to public figures, such as a tie to an American justice minister,” she said.

She insisted that all French ministers did the same. “Have a look at [Christine] Lagarde or [Michele] Allion Marie” she said, referring to France’s former finance and foreign ministers.

Dati will not be obliged to repay the sums personally, as under French law, the ministry must foot the bill.

The remaining €180,000 went to a consulting and opinion survey company called GiacomettiPeron, which is embroiled in an investigation into “favouritism and embezzlement of public funds” regarding contracts with the previous conservative government. The auditor said there was no proper mention of “services rendered” for the money.

The company is co-owned by Pierre Giacometti, a former close adviser to Sarkozy. GiacomettiPeron denies any wrongdoing.

Dati, a lawyer who reportedly made €700,00 in 2012, found herself in hot water last November for failing to pay her membership fees to Sarkozy’s centre-Right UMP party, amounting to €5,500.

PARIS — Past the racks of hair accessories on the ground floor of the Monoprix supermarket on the corner of the Rue Réaumur and the Boulevard de Sébastopol in the Second Arrondissement, there is a door marked staff-only.

Slip through that passageway and turn left down a spiralling metal staircase into the basement. Past pallets of juice and soda bottles, down another flight of stairs, you will find a grim reminder of Paris’ history: a mass grave, with row upon row of medieval skeletons, 316 in total.

Archaeologists believe the discovery, unearthed in January, is part of the cemetery of a medieval hospital called the Hôpital de la Trinité that used to stand nearby. The long-buried mass grave is a reminder that Paris, for all its surface grandeur, is still replete with undiscovered archaeological treasures, some grand, others much more grisly.

For archaeologists, though, grisly can be good.

Guia Besana / The New York Times

“Each dig is an event, but a cemetery is even better, because you have a real population at hand,” said Boris Bove, a historian and professor at the Université Paris 8 who recently co-wrote a book on the French capital in the Middle Ages. “Most of the time, you only stumble upon buildings.”

The skeletons were excavated by a team from France’s National Institute for Preventive Archaeology, or INRAP, led by Isabelle Abadie, an anthropologist and archaeologist.

“There are babies, there are young children, there are teenagers, there are adults, men, women, elderly people,” Abadie said on a recent afternoon at an INRAP warehouse in La Courneuve, a suburb on the northern outskirts of Paris, where the skeletal remains are now housed.

“This was a mortality crisis, that much is clear,” she added, gesturing toward stacks of crates that contained hundreds of numbered plastic bags, each of them full of bones tinted brown by the passing of centuries. Nearby, some of the remains had been carefully washed with water and toothbrushes and left to dry on metal trays.

Abadie and her team spent 2 1/2 months excavating the remains from eight graves covering more than 1,000 square feet, sometimes up to five people deep. In the main pit, 175 bodies were neatly aligned head to toe. Those found in the other, smaller, graves were jumbled together – a sign, perhaps, of the rush to bury the dead during a worsening epidemic.

Pathological DNA testing and carbon dating could take months, so it is too early for Abadie to know for sure when or how the bodies came to be buried underneath what is now the supermarket. “It could be the plague, it could be a famine, it can be many things at this stage – but there are no traces of trauma, so these aren’t deaths linked to an act of violence or war,” she said.

Bove, the historian, said Paris was struck by the plague, like much of the rest of Europe, during the great epidemic of the late 1340s. “We can’t give an absolute number, but it wouldn’t have been unlikely that the city lost a third of its population,” he said.

Pierre Vallat, deputy regional director for the INRAP, said the Hôpital de la Trinité was built outside city limits in the early 13th century and had at different times served as a shelter for the poor and for pilgrims, a place of religious teaching that put on biblical plays, an infectious disease center, and even a vocational school for children.

Guia Besana / The New York TimesIsabelle Abadie, an anthropologist and archaeologist who spent months excavating remains at the site of a mass grave.

Vallat and Abadie said the discovery was the first medieval hospital setting to be excavated in Paris. Being able to study the remains of those who lived in the capital, not in distant provinces, would yield precious information on decisions made by those in power and how they affected the population.

“The history of this hospital really bears witness to the whole history of France,” Vallat said. “This is a total history, not just the history of the rich and famous. This isn’t Versailles.”

Many medieval cemeteries had their contents transferred into the Paris catacombs in the late 18th century, though some of the remains at this burial site might have been overlooked when the hospital closed during the French Revolution and, in 1812, when it was finally dismantled and the site was covered up by new construction.

The French businessman Félix Potin opened one of Paris’ first modern retail stores on the corner of Rue Réaumur and Boulevard de Sébastopol in 1860. After the company was sold off in the 1990s, that location became the Monoprix, which is still adorned with decorated balconies and topped by a large gray dome.

Because Paris has been continuously occupied since the Middle Ages, there are few places that can easily be excavated. Archaeological digs are rare and initiated only when construction workers accidentally stumble upon ruins or remains, or when INRAP comes on sites before work begins to pre-empt potential damage.

From an archaeological standpoint, Paris is almost like unexploited terrain

“From an archaeological standpoint, Paris is almost like unexploited terrain,” Bove said.

In 2013, during construction of a new reception hall at police headquarters on the Île de la Cité, an INRAP team excavated several layers of history, including the foundations of a 17th century Barnabite church. In 2006, construction of a research facility at the Pierre and Marie Curie University on the Left Bank led to the discovery of remnants of a road and of several houses from the Gallo-Roman era, which ended in the fifth century.

When management of the Monoprix supermarket decided to renovate the store’s basement, workers came across long-forgotten cellars, and, underneath them, the skeletons.

Sometimes, digging things up is the only way to reveal what archives cannot. In the 1980s, when construction of a glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre uncovered many older portions of the royal palace, it was the first time archaeologists were able to see the city’s 14th century outer wall, built under the reign of Charles V.

The real discoveries are still buried, and the French capital’s former inhabitants have left plenty to find, especially in its heart, where inhabitants piled historical layers on top of each other.

“Paris was originally built around the Seine, on ground that was liable to flooding,” said Didier Busson, an archaeologist who works for the city. “And when you have to regularly rebuild, you compress the existing soil, which slowly heightens the ground level.”

In some spots on the Ile de la Cité, Busson said, “all of Paris’ history is in a 6-meter slice of ground,” sometimes just below the local supermarket.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/grisly-relic-from-frances-medieval-past-found-beneath-paris-supermarket/feed0stdA researcher at the site of the mass grave under a Monoprix supermarket in the Second Arrondissement of Paris.Guia Besana / The New York TimesGuia Besana / The New York Times